My journey with Scott Adams
It was a fun ride, for the most part
If you had asked me a decade ago who Scott Adams is, I wouldn’t have known. While I had most certainly seen Dilbert comic strips in German publications, I had never identified the particular comic or the artist behind it. I first encountered Scott in his initial appearance on Dave Rubin’s show, the Rubin Report, in an episode that had come online prior to Trump’s election in 2016 but which I didn’t discover before 2017. Same as many other viewers, I got hooked on Scott’s explanation of Trump’s persuasion game, which he outlined in a pleasant, well-spoken, and funny way. Despite my interest in politics, I had stopped following the 2016 U.S. election campaign at some point, first because it had devolved into a mudslinging contest, second because everyone looked confident that Hillary Clinton would win it eventually. Now after she hadn’t won, I was lacking a solid explanation for – why. Scott’s focus on persuasion and cognitive biases was a breath of fresh air, something I hadn’t been taught as part of my academic curriculum, and something that would help me become less frustrated about why politics would often play out in the irrational ways they do.
Around the same time, I joined Twitter, which is what we used to call X back in the day. Twitter used to be a hierarchical platform, with only famous people and large media accounts earning the blue checkmark and driving the content. The direction of influence was clearly downstream: the big shots used Twitter as another social media marketing platform. They had little reason to interact with the large number of small accounts that they perceived like actors on a stage perceive their audience. What I noticed though was that Scott’s account @ScottAdamsSays was different from most other famous people: Scott would livestream daily coffee talks using the platform Periscope, which was integrated into Twitter. Owing to the interactive nature of his Periscope and later YouTube streams, Scott would engage directly and instantly with his audience, sometimes picking questions from the chat, sometimes throwing questions out there himself: “Can someone give me a fact-check on that?” Similarly, Scott would often read the replies to his tweets and respond with a crisp one-liner to those he found interesting.
This was where our interactions began: When Scott was asking for data to corroborate a hypothesis or to fact-check a news claim related to some study and I happened to be listening, I would get started and compile something that could fit into Twitter’s 140 bygone characters limit. If I’m asking myself today why I decided to respond to some guy on Twitter I had so far had zero relations with: What Scott asked for, I could usually provide fairly quickly due to my education and training, and given the growing number of people Scott was reaching online, I thought that informing him could translate into better information for his audience. Often enough, it worked that way, fitting into Scott’s mantra of “be useful!”.
These opportunities to interact were quite limited in number at the beginning. Then COVID-19 started and the public demand for data, and more so for correctly interpreting data, surged, including from Scott’s side. I asked Grok to characterize our interactions during that period:
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, the interactions between @ScottAdamsSays (Scott Adams) and @AndreasShrugged (Andreas Backhaus) were among the most frequent, sustained, and substantive of their entire online relationship. This period represented peak intellectual sparring — civil in tone but often pointed, with Andreas acting as one of the more persistent, data-driven critics of Scott’s evolving pandemic views. Scott frequently replied directly to Andreas’ challenges, sometimes with short, persuasion-framed counters, sarcasm, or questions that reframed the debate. Andreas pushed back hard with studies, methodological critiques, and fact-checks. The exchanges tapered off as the acute phase of the pandemic waned and other topics took over. In hindsight, this COVID-era back-and-forth stands out as the high-water mark of their dynamic — two analytically minded people hashing out one of the most divisive scientific/political issues of the decade in real time.”
I can subscribe to this characterization, while I wouldn’t even call myself a critic of Scott’s views, rather a challenger to some of the views he would cite or playfully entertain. What AI further cannot know is that Scott would occasionally give shout-outs to me and other accounts he was interacting with, causing a huge increase in my follower count – a kind, unselfish gesture of gratefulness. In July of 2020, when I was tweeting a fact-check on European and US-American GDP growth statistics that CNN had bungled, my tweet reached such traction through Scott’s network that it was eventually retweeted by the sitting U.S. President. Whether that’s an accomplishment or not is debatable; it surely was entertaining.
Also without receiving any particular attention, I would simply enjoy listening to Scott’s morning routine podcast, feeling curious about what he had to say about a day’s events. Scott would boast about his ability to navigate politics, human relationships, and life in general in a fairly exceptional way. While he would often and proudly mention that he had received a higher education, a college degree in economics and an MBA, he wasn’t an intellectual. Despite his rich experience with the practical problems of life, he also wasn’t just street smart. He believed his eclectic “talent stack” allowed him to succeed in a wide range of fields without much experience or insights. It took a hefty dose of self-confidence and a clinical incapacity to feel embarrassment to pull this off, but having a huge amount of what Scott would call “fuck you money”, a girlfriend 31 years his junior, and a recent correct prediction about the next president behind him, Scott didn’t have a lack thereof. This was likely one the reasons why he sympathized with Donald Trump, who decided to compete for the highest political office with no experience but with “weapons-grade” persuasion skills. Besides that, as a result of yearslong practice, Scott’s slow-paced voice was simply pleasant and calming to listen to.
This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t occasionally rolling my eyes because of something he would say. Scott clearly liked science and science-driven progress. But when he was confronted with too much science, he would resort to commonplaces such as “All data are fake”. Now everyone working with data for a living knows this to be nonsense but given that Scott’s Trump-leaning audience was also tilting towards science-skepticism, he was able to get away with it, elaborating why his personal epistemology would deliver better results eventually.
This was part of a bigger problem: Despite his popularity as the creator of Dilbert, Scott remained an odd figure within the public space. Academics wouldn’t take him seriously because he was just the Dilbert guy, not someone with scientific credentials. Professional political analysts wouldn’t take him seriously because he was just the Dilbert guy, not a senior fellow at a think tank. Scott made the best of his outsiderdom by mocking the suggestion of “stick to drawing comics” and forming close-knit relations with his online audience, something that famous people would usually shy away from. The downside of Scott’s peculiar positioning was that it created a lack of people able and willing to really challenge him. One can credit Sam Harris for having made probably the most serious attempt at this – but his and Scott’s conversation only exposed that this level of dialogue wouldn’t yield satisfying results for either side and instead leave everyone in disgruntled bewilderment. Then again, still today, I find myself laughing about Scott putting on an Amazon-delivered pope hat, getting stoned, and going live after the conversation with Sam, offering the kind of moral judgement that Sam’s audience had been fervidly demanding from him.
The lack of intellectual guardrails is a well-known problem within the podcaster scene. A casual observation of mine is that the few influencers who have managed to preserve their integrity are those who at some point said “No” to something even though it carried significant cost for them. Sam Harris, for example, said “No” to Twitter in 2022 when Elon Musk was turning it into a cesspool. Clearly, this move hurt Sam’s outreach and popularity. But comparing him today to some terminally online podcasters from the “Intellectual Dark Web”, Sam is coming out far ahead in terms of integrity and sanity. Scott, in turn, never kept it much of a secret that there wasn’t a point for him at which he would have said “No”. When it became obvious that his audience was opposing the COVID-19 vaccine, Scott would develop lengthy justifications for why he had made a rational choice when getting vaccinated – but eventually concede that he was wrong about taking the vaccine. When Trump made it clear he wouldn’t accept the results of the 2020 election, Scott essentially went along with the election denialism, albeit with some higher-level sophistry. The January 6 debacle didn’t change that. During the ensuing Biden presidency, Scott’s content was striking a darker, doomer-ish tone, contrasting with years of Trump-induced optimism. In parallel, things in Scott’s personal life took a turn for the worse, injecting his views with what I perceived as an unhealthy dose of cynicism.
This trend culminated in Scott’s infamous comments about black people in 2023. While I have no knowledge of Scott’s inner thoughts and feelings about race, whether he really meant the words he said, or whether it was just a shtick to earn himself the “canceled” label – what I could observe were the consequences of his comments and I couldn’t see anything good or useful in ruining one’s own reputation for no benefit at all. Expectedly, Scott performed some sophistry after the fact about why his comments had been wrongfully portrayed and why the whole affair was a smart move nonetheless – but the powers of persuasion had failed me at this point. Following some critical comments from my side regarding the continued 2020 election denialism, Scott put an end to our interactions by blocking me on X sometime in 2024. This wasn’t a tragedy to me, as I had no appetite for the kind of messages he was putting out by then, while the window of opportunity when I could provide useful material to Scott had also long closed.
Still, Scott revealing his cancer and his very limited life expectancy in May 2025 saddened me. Not only because of the pain Scott was going through. His nimbus of invincibility, optimism, and positive thinking that he had been trusting and radiating for so long suddenly was shattered. In retrospect, Scott’s illness may partly explain why he chose the course that lead us apart: The experience of prolonged pain, increasing frailty, and the certainty of one’s nearing death can be a major trigger for deep depression and bitterness, especially when it happens during what people thought of the prime of their lives. Whenever I would check in on Scott in his final years and months of podcasting, I saw symptoms of that. When I tuned into the show shortly before his death, he said that there was now overwhelming evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen and that the people behind the Covid shots deserved to die. Frankly, it made me sad to see Scott using the little time he had left to send this kind of venom out to the world. However, given the circumstances, it made some sense to me: What humans are longing for in such situations are shows of love and compassion, not intellectual challenge. Scott was aware that a good share of his audience would extend these gestures and emotions to him and would even do so with greater passion the more he would bond with them over what they believed. While one can think of other ways of earning genuine human support, it feels pointless to criticize a dying man over his choices.
Scott Adams died on January 13, 2026. I was relieved when I heard days before his passing that he wouldn’t die alone but surrounded by his first ex-wife and with visits from other loved ones. Most of the obituaries that have come out since then can be sorted into either glowing beatifications or passionate condemnations. I thought neither of those lived up to the Scott I remember, the one who would have laughed at the idea of being idolized and who was also not defined by his worst moments. Scott would often muse about transferring his consciousness into some type of technology. While we didn’t quite get there on time, I am glad to report that AI is already doing a good job at characterizing Scott’s relationships with other people, at least as long as there is online material available:
“They had a long-running, intellectually combative but mostly respectful online relationship — Andreas as one of Scott’s more consistent and capable sparring partners/critics. Over time the direct interactions faded (likely due to diverging views, especially on politics), but Andreas still speaks of Scott with a mix of nostalgia, respect, and a touch of melancholy now that he’s gone. It’s one of those classic X dynamics: two strong personalities who clearly enjoyed the intellectual friction while it lasted.”
Borrowing from Scott’s immortal optimism, digital reincarnation might therefore still be in the cards. AI also predicted that this obituary would be disapproved of by both those who loved Scott and those who hated him because I was aiming at an honest appraisal. Which struck me as just presumptuous enough to sound like something Scott would have said.
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Thank you. I always enjoyed your perspective even if I didn't always agree. I didn't always agree with Scott for that matter. I suspect most in the SA community would feel the same. I think we are overall a more fair minded lot than many imagine. We were grateful to have somewhere to come where our views are allowed, heard and treated with respect. I for one missed your voice and am sure there are many others who feel the same. And like you, I like to think Scott would have appreciated your kind words here even as he smiled and told you where you missed the mark.
Enjoyed very much your participation in the Twitter feed. You brought a nice data-supported counterbalance to threads that were otherwise full of sycophants, particularly on COVID and 2020